Home, sweet Twitter home: Welcome to the house that tweets

Your home could soon be telling you its feelings on Twitter (Picture: Reuters)

If your home could speak to you, what would it say?

It might start with something like: ‘Please, for the first time in your life, clean me.’

Or it could shout after you as you hurry out its front door: ‘Oi, you’ve left your keys inside me again, you muppet!’

But bestowing our humble abodes with the ability to communicate could be rather helpful, which is why the idea holds a particular fascination for us.

One tech guru who has taken that fascination to a new level is British designer Tom Coates, who lives in San Francisco and has worked in the past for companies such as Yahoo! and the BBC.

With the help of some gizmos and some technological know-how, he has transformed his California home into a fully-fledged personality.

And where better in the modern age to show your personality than on Twitter? Under the handle @houseofcoates, his home posts regular tweets on temperature, lighting, weather and even when a plant needs watering.

House of Coates automatically tweets messages such as, ‘Turned the office lights off to save some energy’ and ‘Huh. Looks like light rain’.

Coates has hooked his home up with a range of technology to give it a voice on Twitter. But why?

‘We look after our houses and we have emotional attachments to them, but when you’re travelling or out at work or whatever, they’re sitting there and they’re quite vulnerable,’ he told Metro.

‘I thought it would be nice to have my house communicate with me about how it’s doing in a mechanism I understand and like: Twitter.’

Coates wanted to demonstrate that making your house speak need not involve the kind of technology that is out of our grasp – all of the devices he uses are available to purchase online or off a shelf.

Light switches from Belkin WeMo allow him to turn the lights in his bedroom, office and living room on and off using his smartphone. A motion sensor from the same company can tell him if there is anyone in his living room. The house regularly tweets: ‘hey @tomcoates – there’s some motion in the sitting room. Is that you?’

The automatic tweets are made possible through web platform IFTTT (If This Then That), which takes the information from the sensors and posts subsequent messages on Twitter.

A small sensor box called Twine, made by Supermechanical, measures temperature in the house and also the moisture level of Coates’ ‘extremely unhealthy and grumpy’ ficus plant.

The box is also fitted with a vibration sensor to send an alert in the case of an earthquake, but this hasn’t been triggered yet.

Finally, a Dropcam video camera in the living room lets Coates see what’s happening no matter where he is in the world through his smartphone.

‘When the motion alarm goes off, I’ve got it so that my house tweets at me and asks if I’m at home,’ he explained. ‘If I’m not, I can hop on to my phone, see what’s going on in my sitting room and even turn on the lights if it’s dark.’

The system is also hooked up to nearby weather sensors, so it will tweet when it starts to rain.

Coates is quick to point out that he isn’t the first person to make his home Twitter-enabled.

In 2009, British IT engineer Andy Stanford-Clark, who works as a ‘master inventor’ at IBM, fitted the objects in his home on the Isle of Wight with a series of sensors and his house tweeted the resulting updates, including those related to an electricity meter and a mouse trap.

With @houseofcoates, the person who dwells inside it isn’t afraid to engage the property in some Twitter banter.

‘In the mornings, when it notices that I’m moving around, it asks if it’s me and I often reply,’ said Coates. ‘When objects start talking in public, then other people start talking to them too.

‘I’m trying to work out what it might be like for everyone to have a slightly different relationship with their objects and home, one where they’re like trusted friends.’

Coates and software designer Matt Biddulph are the founders of Product Club, a tech start-up which looks at the link between ‘the physical world and the internet’.

‘I’m not a great fan of the phrase, the Internet of Things, but I’m very keen on the idea that ever cheapening technology can open up whole new areas of networked devices in the world,’ said Coates.

‘I can imagine scenarios where you don’t buy washing machines but are given them and charged every time you use them or where manufacturers can keep track of how their devices are working and contact you to fix problems before your device breaks down.’

He said Biddulph is currently building a mobile phone from scratch to potentially embed the technology into something else, ‘like a dishwasher, a car or, well, anything really’ to make it more responsive.

‘Whether we’ll all be using Twitter remains to be seen, but I think the idea that you’d be able to keep tabs on how your home or your other objects are doing is probably the future for many of us,’ added Coates.

House of Coates may have fewer than 200 followers so far, but it already has that highly coveted status symbol – a parody Twitter account.

He isn’t sure who is behind it, but Coates has welcomed the appearance on Twitter of Haunted Coates House (@hauntedcoates), which tweets creepy messages such as ‘I just flickered the downstairs lights. It was getting boring’.

But is he worried about real intruders?

‘Obviously, there could be security implications about publically telling the world that you’re out and that the house is unprotected – and I wouldn’t generally recommend to people that they put up something as public as my house’s twitter feed.

‘But my house is pretty well protected. It’s a pretty tiny house, but it’s overlooked by loads of other houses, it’s hidden away from the street and there are a number of gates and doors and walls you’d have to find your way over before you could break in.

‘And, of course, if you did break in, I’d have a video of it and would be notified immediately on Twitter and could call the police pretty much as it happened.’